'Intergalactic Travel Bureau' Wants to Plan Your Space Vacation

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NEW YORK - If you're thinking about taking an exotic vacation
this summer, why not look beyond Earth to one of the many
intriguing destinations in our solar system? If that sounds good
to you, a science outreach group may have just the ticket.

The U.K.-based organization Guerilla Science has created a mock
travel agency to teach the public about spaceflight and our
solar system by planning far-out trips to nearby planets and
moons.

The Intergalactic Travel Bureau will be featured as part of
Guerilla Science's exhibit at the FIGMENT Art festival, which is
being held this weekend (June 9 and 10) on New York City's
Governor's Island. The free event is designed to spur imagination
and invention between artists and the public in participatory
ways.

The festival will provide a perfect setting to debut the
Intergalactic Travel Bureau in this country, said Mark Rosin, a
physicist at UCLA and one of the founders of Guerilla Science.

"We did this at the Royal Observatory in London about a year and
a half ago, but this will be the Travel Bureau's first journey to
the United States," Rosin told SPACE.com. "The response was so
positive. The fact that it's playful makes it much more
enjoyable, and it takes the onus away from learning something."

The Travel Bureau is presented as interactive theater, where
participants can plan extraterrestrial vacations with scientists
who act as travel consultants. As people map out the journey,
they can learn about astronomy and human spaceflight in the
process. [ Our
Solar System: A Photo Tour of the Planets ]

"Say they want to take a cultural trip, we might suggest they go
to Jupiter, where there are interesting artistic patterns in the
atmosphere," Rosin said. "If they're looking to go somewhere nice
and sunny, we might suggest Mercury. If they prefer skating,
there are other places with excellent conditions for that. We
want to make this playful and interactive, with a lot of
educational content."

The mission of the Travel Bureau is to engage the public in
science and astronomy in a way that is fun and interactive.

"The goal is to get people thinking about space travel and help
them to get to know the solar system around them," said Olivia
Koski, a journalist and member of Guerilla Science. "The
Intergalactic Travel Bureau creates these casual, fun ways of
talking about the planets: Mercury is great for sun
worshippers, and you better pack your sunscreen because the sun
is [six times] brighter in the sky there than it is on Earth. And
make sure to bring an oxygen tank when you go to Venus because
the atmosphere there is carbon dioxide. It's a way of
personalizing or humanizing these mystical far away objects in
the sky — objects we know so much about now after decades of
space exploration."

With several
private companies developing new spaceships to take astronauts
and other paying customers into orbit, a new industry of space
tourism is taking shape. Rocket builders, such as Hawthorne,
Calif.-based SpaceX, are paving the way for paid trips to
low-Earth orbit, potentially making the idea of space vacations
something for the not-too-distant future.

"I wouldn't be surprised at all if within my lifetime, sooner
rather than later, that [SpaceX CEO] Elon Musk sends someone to
the moon for the first time in over forty years," Koski said. "So
that's already making at least one of our vacation packages a
reality. There will be an employee at
SpaceX whose job it is to price out a package for a moon
adventure. It will probably be way more than any average person
can afford, but that makes the Intergalactic Travel Bureau so
much more realistic."

Rosin and Koski will both be present at the FIGMENT Art festival
this weekend representing Guerilla Science.

The Intergalactic Travel Bureau project is financed through
FundaGeek, a crowdsourcing initiative to help people raise money
for scientific and innovative programs. Supporters can pledge
money for the International Travel Bureau project through the
FundaGeek website.

The FIGMENT Art festival will run from June 9 to 10 on Governor's
Island. The free event features other space-themed exhibits,
including a musical performance called "Leonids," named for the
meteor shower, and a game of mini golf that was inspired by the
Atari arcade game "Asteroids."